I promise not to discuss COVID-19 in detail in this post. The recent deluge of hot legal takes about the pandemic may be making a lot of people sicker than the virus itself. So, let’s talk about a different, earlier disaster.
Believe it or not, eight years after the winds of Hurricane Sandy struck New…
In the 2008 film Wall-E, Earth is a post-apocalyptic wasteland with nothing on it but the abandoned remnants of human society, and a forlorn, trash-compacting robot. The robot’s only living company is a pet cockroach named Hal, which I guess is Pixar’s nod to the popular notion that cockroaches will outlive us all. (Or…
Here’s a piece of useless trivia for you. You know that old saying that something “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”? The saying apparently originated back in 1861, when Count Johann Bernhard von Rechberg und Rothenlöwen (remember him?), an Austrian statesman, was presented with a document recognizing Italy as a nation-state, and first uttered…
Not long ago, there was a kerfuffle over the use of the term “OK, Boomer,” which I guess is a pejorative term aimed at my generation for being out-of-touch with the modern world. (See the Vox article here.) Truth be told, maybe we are out of touch, at least about some things. As someone…
In the “Cheese Shop” sketch from the old Monty Python comedy series, John Cleese plays a customer trying to buy some cheese from “Ye National Cheese Emporium, purveyor of fine cheese to the gentry (and the poverty-stricken too)”. The cheese shop proprietor, played by Michael Palin, seems to have no cheese in stock, not even…
If you’re involved in the legal business for any length of time, every once in a while, you’ll come across a case in which the facts are so horrible, and the result so seemingly wrongheaded, that you can’t help but feel that our entire system has failed. A recent decision from the Third Circuit, Arena…
Because most people think that insurance law is about as exciting as watching grass grow, I try to be somewhat entertaining in these posts. Probably I usually fail, but at least I keep myself amused.
If there’s one thing that we wannabe comedians hate, though, it’s being upstaged. I was recently reading a decision from…
In Billy Wilder’s 1944 film noir masterpiece, “Double Indemnity,” Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) seduces insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) into murdering her husband to collect on his accident policy. (Who knew insurance could be so seedy?) The suspicious and relentless claims adjuster, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), eventually gets to the bottom of the…
“Now the flood was on the earth forty days. The waters increased and lifted up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and greatly increased on the earth, and the ark moved about on the surface of the waters.” [Genesis 7:17.]
I’m guessing that people didn’t have flood insurance in…
There’s a very true old quote about interpreting insurance policies that I (and other policyholder lawyers) like to cite. It goes: “Ambiguity and incomprehensibility seem to be the favorite tools of the insurance trade in drafting policies. Most are a virtually impenetrable thicket of incomprehensible verbosity…The miracle of it all is that the English language…